Microsoft: Hey Digg, we’re still supporting IE6

Internet Explorer 6. Just the name strikes fear into many Web developers.

It’s a pain to code for. It’s a waste of time. It’s eight freakin’ years old.

Such is what the folks at Digg think. In fact, the Digg developers recently posed a question to its users, about 10 percent of whom were still using IE6 in June.

“Why?”

Digg would love to follow YouTube’s lead in dropping support of IE6. In fact, Digg will drop it sometime soon, User Experience Architect Mark Trammell said in a blog post. Digg could soon ask users to upgrade to a newer Web browser, such as Internet Explorer 8.

But out of those 10 percent of Digg users who browse with IE6, most of them can’t upgrade even if they want to, a Digg survey of 1,571 users found. Most of them use it at work, where they don’t have administrative access to their computers or aren’t allowed to install software.

“Many PCs don’t belong to individual enthusiasts, but to organizations. The people in these organizations responsible for these machines decide what to do with them,” Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft’s general manager for Internet Explorer, wrote on the IEBlog. “For these folks, the cost of the software isn’t just the purchase price, but the cost of deploying, maintaining, and making sure it works with their IT infrastructure.”

A month ago, YouTube started asking IE6 users to please, for the love of God, upgrade to “more modern browsers.” The skeptic in me wondered then whether Google, which owns YouTube, also was hoping people would switch to its Chrome browser. Google also is phasing out IE6 support on its social networking site, Orkut.

Digg is still considering dropping IE6 support to focus on more modern Web development. “It consumes time that could be spent building the future of Digg,” Trammell wrote.

Just 5 percent of visitors and 1 percent of Diggs come from IE6 users, the Digg survey found.

On Monday, Microsoft responded to the Digg discussion, which has been rumbling through the Web for some time.

“Dropping support for IE6 is not an option because we committed to supporting the IE included with Windows for the lifespan of the product,” Hachamovitch wrote. “We keep our commitments.”

So, rest easy, Internet Explorer 6 users – or at least easier. The Internet may be starting to abandon you, but Microsoft isn’t. Not yet.